Maya Pottery, Jade, and Material Culture

The most abundant objects the ancient Maya left behind are pots. Hundreds of thousands of ceramic vessels have been recovered from tombs, palaces, midden deposits, and even from the deep cenotes of the Yucatán. Many are simple cooking jars and water-storage vessels; others are the most refined painted works of pre-Columbian America. Together with the stone and shell objects buried with them, they make up a body of material culture unrivaled in Mesoamerica.

The same workshop traditions that produced the great polychrome vases also worked the hard stones of the Maya world: jade, obsidian, and a long list of imported and local materials. This page surveys the pottery, lapidary arts, and material culture of the Maya, from the simplest household ware to the most elaborate jades buried in the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá. For the broader context, see Maya art, architecture, and monuments. For the painted books that share iconography with the polychrome vases, see Maya codices and surviving books; for the long-distance trade in obsidian and jade, see Maya trade, markets, and economy.

A tradition of coiled clay

Maya pottery was built by the coil-and-scrape method. A base of clay was rolled into long ropes that were stacked in a spiral and welded together by pinching and scraping. The walls were then thinned by scraping with a gourd rind or a flat stone, and the surface was finished by burnishing. The potter’s wheel was unknown. Kilns were simple, with bonfires or simple updraft chambers; the typical firing temperature was 600–850°C, well below true stoneware.

Despite the limited technology, Maya potters produced a remarkable range of forms. Cylindrical vases, plates, bowls, effigy vessels, incense burners, whistles, and toys are all well represented. The standard surface treatment for utilitarian wares was an orange, buff, or cream slip burnished to a soft luster. The most refined wares of the Late Classic added painted decoration in multiple colors, often combining red, black, orange, cream, and the rare blue known as maya blue.

Monochrome and utility wares

The everyday pottery of the Maya is the most numerous category. It is dominated by orange-slipped jars and bowls, with a slipped surface that is typically applied to the unburnished vessel and then burnished smooth. The slip is iron-rich and turns red-orange on firing in an oxidizing atmosphere. Many household wares are undecorated, but some carry simple banded or wavy-line decoration in iron-red or black.

A second major category is cream-slipped ware, often associated with the highlands and the southern Pacific coast, where the slip is a kaolin-rich clay. Cream-slipped plates and cylindrical vases were widely traded, including into the lowland centers.

Usulután ware

In the Late Preclassic (c. 400 BCE – 250 CE), a distinctive decorated ware appeared in the southern Maya area: Usulután ware, named for the type site in El Salvador. Usulután pottery is decorated with a resist-painted technique in which a waxy or oily resist is applied to the surface in a pattern before the vessel is dipped in iron-oxide slip; the resist is then washed away, leaving a cream-colored design on a red ground. The classic Usulután pattern is a series of wavy or zig-zag lines, sometimes a stylized bird or feather motif.

Usulután ware was produced in the southern Maya area, including at Copán and in the Motagua valley, and was widely traded into adjacent zones. By the Early Classic it had largely been replaced by the more elaborate polychrome traditions of the central lowlands.

Polychrome traditions of the Late Classic

The Late Classic (c. 600–900 CE) is the great age of Maya painted pottery. Two main regional traditions are usually distinguished.

The first is the “codex-style” polychrome tradition of the central Petén and adjacent areas. Codex-style vessels are typically cylindrical vases (sometimes called “drinking cups”) painted on the outside with a black-line drawing on a cream or orange slip, with red, orange, and yellow accents. The style is named for its resemblance to the painted screenfold books of the Late Classic, the four surviving examples of which are the Maya codices. The drawing style is refined and calligraphic; the layout is often divided into horizontal bands containing figures, glyphs, and decorative scrolls.

The second is the orange-slipped polychrome tradition of the Usumacinta drainage and the Petexbatun region, including Piedras Negras, Yaxchilán, Bonampak, and Altar de Sacrifice. Vessels of this tradition are typically orange-slipped and painted in red, black, cream, and sometimes purple. The drawings are more painterly and the color range is wider. Many of the most famous Late Classic vases, including the Princeton Vase and a long list of cylindrical vessels in major museum collections, are in this tradition.

A useful summary:

Code-style vases and the decipherment of Maya writing

A remarkable feature of the Late Classic polychrome vases is the long hieroglyphic texts that wrap around the rims. Many of these texts have proven central to the decipherment of Maya writing since the 1970s. The “Princeton Vase” carries a passage naming the dedicatee and the ritual event; the cups at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dumbarton Oaks collection, and the British Museum have provided whole royal genealogies and calendar formulas.

The texts on codex-style vases are a major reason epigraphers can now read the inscriptions on the public stelae of the central lowlands. The two systems of Maya writing — the painted books and the carved stones — drew on the same scribal conventions, and the painted vases are often easier to read than the carved stelae.

Plumbate ware: a hard-fired Mesoamerican trade ceramic

In the Early Postclassic (c. 900–1250 CE), a new ware appeared in southern Mesoamerica: Plumbate ware, a hard-fired, vitreous, gray-to-orange surface produced at very high temperatures for the technology of the time. Plumbate is technically not a true stoneware (it has a low clay content and a high iron content, with a feldspathic glaze formed by salt vapor in firing), but it is far harder than ordinary Maya pottery and does not break or scratch easily.

Plumbate was produced in a small number of workshops in the Pacific coastal region of Guatemala and El Salvador, especially in the area of Solola, Izalco, and Chichicastenango. From these workshops, the ware was traded across Mesoamerica, reaching central Mexico, the Yucatán, and the highlands of Guatemala. It is the only known pre-Columbian Mesoamerican trade ware to have circulated so widely, and it is a useful chronological marker for Postclassic sites.

Other ceramic traditions

Beyond the major polychrome traditions, Maya potters produced a long list of specialized forms.

• Effigy vessels in the shape of fish, mammals, birds, and human heads were common in the Late Classic. The most elaborate are the Holmul-style vases of the Late Classic, named for the type site, which combine sculptural form with painted scenes in a style related to the great Bonampak murals.
• Incense burners (incensarios) of the Postclassic were tall ceramic pedestals with elaborate modeled and painted decoration, often showing gods and ancestors. The most spectacular are the Tohil Plumbate incense burners of highland Guatemala.
• Ritual whistles and ocarinas in human and animal form were widely produced for use in ceremonies, especially in the Late Classic.
• Figurines of humans, especially female figures, are abundant in household contexts and are thought to have had domestic cultic functions.
• Drums and flutes in fired clay are represented in painted vases and have been recovered archaeologically; the most famous is the Stela of the Drummer at Bonampak, where a drum is shown being played in the central plaza.

Jadeite jade: the stone of the gods

The most prestigious material in the Maya world was jadeite jade, a sodium-aluminum pyroxene that occurs naturally in only a few places in the world. In Mesoamerica, the principal source is the Motagua River valley in highland Guatemala, where jadeite boulders were extracted from prehistoric quarries and worked in major Preclassic workshops.

The Maya worked jadeite into a wide range of objects:

• Celt-shaped pendants in the Preclassic, often carved with the image of a god or ancestor.
• Jadeite masks of the Middle and Late Preclassic, often covering the face of a high-status burial. The most famous Preclassic mask was found in the tomb of a king at Calakmul and is now in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
• Earspools, pendants, and necklaces worn as status markers throughout the Classic period.
• Mosaic inlays of the Late Classic and Postclassic, in which hundreds of tesserae of jadeite were cut, polished, and cemented onto a wooden or stucco backing to form masks, disks, and plaques.

The most famous jadeite mosaics were dredged by Edward H. Thompson from the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá between 1904 and 1907. They include:

• A jadeite mosaic disk depicting a face emerging from the mouth of a serpent.
• A jadeite mosaic mask of a man’s face, with shell and obsidian inlays.
• A set of plaques depicting warriors with atlatls and shields.
• A jadeite skull with movable lower jaw, the largest of the recovered mosaics.

These objects, most of which are now in the Peabody Museum at Harvard, are the most spectacular examples of Maya lapidary art.

Other stones: obsidian, chert, pyrite, and mirrors

Beyond jade, the Maya worked a wide range of other stones.

• Obsidian was a major trade item, used for blades, eccentrics, projectile points, and mirrors. Major sources include El Chayal, Ixtepeque, and Pachuca (in central Mexico), all of which exported obsidian across Mesoamerica.
• Chert and flint were the principal materials for axes, hammers, and many tools.
• Pyrite and hematite were polished into mirrors, used by rulers and priests for scrying and for divination. The famous Mosaic Mirror at Tikal has a pyrite disk set in a frame of carved bone.
• Limestone was the main building material, used for cut-stone facing, lime stucco, and carved relief.
• Sandstone boulders at Quiriguá were carved into the largest stelae in the Maya world.

Shell, bone, and feathers

• Marine shell — especially Spondylus and Strombus from the Pacific coast, and conch from the Caribbean — was carved into tinklers, earspools, beads, and pendants. Spondylus was associated with blood and rain, and was a major component of elite burials.
• Bone and ivory were carved into awls, bloodletting implements, and figurines. A famous Late Classic example is the Jaina-style ceramic figurine, often shown with a stingray spine in the chest cavity.
• Feathers of the resplendent quetzal, scarlet macaw, blue cotinga, and other birds were used for capes, headdresses, and standards. Quetzal feathers were the most valuable, and the long green tail plumes of the male bird were reserved for the headdresses of kings.

Perishable arts

The Maya also worked a wide range of perishable materials that survive only in the form of archaeological traces, painted representations, or inferences. Bark paper (amate and other types) was used for the painted screenfold books, the four surviving examples of which are the Maya codices. Wooden lintels of softwood were carved in low relief and painted, as the Yaxchilán and Bonampak examples show. Textiles of cotton, bark, and feathers were woven on backstrap looms; the painted vases of the Late Classic show courtly figures in elaborate garments, but the textiles themselves have not survived in the tropical lowlands.

A long, layered tradition

The pottery, lapidary arts, and material culture of the Maya span more than 3,000 years, from the earliest village potters of the Middle Preclassic to the last independent craftspeople of the Postclassic. The traditions are not uniform: they evolve, they spread, they are abandoned, they return. But the underlying principles — the use of local materials, the technical mastery of stone and clay, the encoding of status and meaning in worked materials — remain the same. To study Maya material culture is to read the lives of ordinary households, the rituals of kings, and the long, layered history of an ancient civilization through the things they chose to make and to keep.

Related pages

• Maya art, architecture, and monuments
• Maya pyramids, temples, and sacred architecture
• Maya stelae, altars, and stone monuments
• Maya murals, painting, and iconography
• Major Maya cities and archaeological sites
• Maya trade, markets, and economy
• Maya society, politics, and daily life

Sources

• Miller, M. E. (1999). Maya Art and Architecture. Thames & Hudson. — link
• Miller, M. E. (1986). The Murals of Bonampak. Princeton University Press. — link
• Schele, L. & Freidel, D. (1990). A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya. William Morrow. — link
• Houston, S. D., Stuart, D. & Taube, K. A. (2006). The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience in Ancient Mexico. University of Texas Press. — link
• Taube, K. A. (2010). Maya Deities and the Place of Vision: A Workbook on Maya Iconography. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press. — link